SRI
AUROBINDO

(1872
 1950)

SRI
AUROBINDO, born in Calcutta in 1872, had a thorough Western education
in England. Soon after he came back to India in 1893, he declared : We
have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti.
In 1906, in the columns of the Bande Mataram, he was the
first Indian to publicly call for India's independence from the British
Empire. He thus became the
most dangerous man we have to deal with,
as the then Viceroy called him, and was later jailed on sedition charges.
During his one-year-long imprisonment at Alipore, Sri Aurobindo had major
spiritual realizations. But a
solitary salvation leaving the world to its fate was felt as almost distasteful,
and he decided that a
yoga which requires me to give up the world is not for me.
Sri Aurobindo narrowly escaped the gallows. From a revolutionary fighting
for India's freedom, he became a revolutionary in the spiritual field
; for forty years, from 1910 to 1950, digging to the deepest roots of
our misery, he sought to transform the entire human nature down to the
body, in a divine rehabilitation of Matter. His integral
yoga aims at embodying
the next principle of consciousness beyond mental man : to Sri Aurobindo,
evolution is not over, and the growing chaos we see in the world is not
just the end of a cycle, but the birth throes of a new age :